"If his office's budget is cut again, Kentucky's top public defender plans to tell his lawyers to refuse to take new cases of poor people charged with crimes. "I think innocent people will end up being convicted of crimes," said Ernie Lewis, head of the Public Advocacy Department."

"His decision means impoverished criminal defendants might go to trial, and face potentially lengthy terms in prison, with no attorney -- or they could be released without their case being heard, Lewis said. Without lawyers, some defendants might feel pressured to plead guilty, he said."

[link via Instapundit]

Thanks to new data now available on TRACFED, subscribers can quickly examine the actual performance of individual federal prosecutors from Fiscal Years 1986 to 2002. Also available on TRAC's public site is a summary report that reveals wide variations found among assistant U.S. attorneys (AUSAs) in the percentage of investigative matters they decline to prosecute.

"Until now, because of the complexity of the judicial process, knowledge about the record of each federal prosecutor was largely anecdotal. With the new TRACFED prosecutors tool reporters, lawyers, public interest groups and others can quickly obtain the case-by-case listings of individual AUSAs as well as counts on referrals process and statistical information about the percent of matters declined, kinds of cases handled, etc. Compare the sentences achieved by one prosecutor with the sentences of all prosecutors in the district or the U.S."

Regulations.gov is a new U.S. Government web site where you can find, review, and submit comments on Federal documents that are open for comment and published in the Federal Register.

The site also has a variety of links to agencies' regulatory information pages, Executive Orders, OMB policy directives, and rule tracking information, as well as a gateway to Federal Register publications on GPO Access, including the daily Federal Register, the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) and e-CFR, a new online edition of the CFR updated daily.

(thanks to Miami criminal defense lawyer Neal Sonnett for the link)

Diana Alvarez, a Government lawyer in the Elian Gonzales case has sued Ashcroft and the INS for damages, alleging she was a victim of retaliation.

Diana Alvarez claims one of her superiors at the Immigration and Naturalization Service made disparaging comments about Cuban-Americans and deliberately kept her from receiving a good evaluation after she objected to ``anti-Cuban bigotry and discrimination'' during the seven-month custody battle over Elian. ``There was an atmosphere of outward discrimination against Cuban-Americans at the Miami district INS office, discrimination that was fully condoned and many times initiated by management,'' Alvarez, who is Cuban-American, said Tuesday. ``The retaliation is ongoing to this day and there truly seems to be no end in sight.''

Alvarez is seeking damages for "employment discrimination, emotional distress and injury to reputation."

Law Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds today makes the case that Congress has no power to regulate abortion. The Constitution gives Congress certain enumerated rights--Reynolds goes through them all-- and abortion regulation is not on the list. The only thing that is arguably in the ballpark is the Commerce power, and Reynolds explains why that is too much of a stretch, given Supreme Court opinions limiting the application of that power in recent years.

For more on this view, you can read a law review article the Professor wrote with Dave Koppel here.

Sometime you might just want to sue a corporation. Your lawsuit (Complaint) has to be served on the corporation's registered agent. These are on file in the Secretary of State's office where they incorporated. It can be a time consuming process sometimes.

To make it easier, we are providing a link we learned about today from LawSites, the blog of legal tech author/lawyer Robert Ambrogi. Go here, and you can find out the name and address of a corporation's registered agent. The list is provided by Maryland attorney Terry Berger.

Most states provide the information for free. Here's Terry's breakdown:

"42 states have free web access to find a corporation's resident agent.

4 states charge to get this information online (IN, MN, NE, and OK). Of those 4 states, 3 offer the info free by phone (IN, MN, and NE). Minnesota is the first state in the country to start charging to get this information online where it was previously free. (To get the information free, you now need to tie up an employee.)

Only 1 state in the entire country, NJ, charges to get this public information, even by phone. (New Jersey advised me that you can avoid their fee if you fly/drive to downtown Trenton, pay for parking, then go to the State Office Building.)

3 states (NH, OK, and SD) and DC have free online searches in the works and anticipate having free online search capability soon.

Only 1 state (DE) has no plans at all to offer online search functions for resident agent information.

Puerto Rico has not responded to numerous requests for information."

We also came across The Shout today, a law blog by cyberlawyer Jennifer Granick, who directs the public interest law and technology clinic at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society. There, her work focuses on the interaction of free speech, privacy, computer security, law and technology. Jennifer is very well known within the hacker community, having represented (among many others) Kevin Poulsen and alleged eBay hacker Jerome Heckencamp, who, notoriously, fired her.

It is better that 5, 10, 20, or 100 guilty men go free than for one innocent man to be put to death. This prinicple is embodied in the presumption of innocence. In 1895, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a decision in the case Coffin v. United States, 156 U.S. 432; 15 S. Ct. 394, traced the presumption of innocence, past England, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, and, at least according to Greenleaf, to Deuteronomy. [also, Alexander Volokh wrote a law review article on the issue, available free here.]

The Coffin case stands for the proposition that at the request of a defendant, a court must not only instruct on the prosecution's burden of proof--that a defendant cannot be convicted unless the government has proven his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt--but also must instruct on the presumption of innocence--by informing the jury that a defendant is presumed innocent. The Court stated,

The principle that there is a presumption of innocence in favor of the accused is the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary, and its enforcement lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law.

In tracing the presumption of innocence, the Court goes on to state:

It is stated as unquestioned in the text-books, and has been referred to as a matter of course in the decisions of this court and in the courts of the several States. See Taylor on Evidence, vol. 1, c. 5, 126, 127; Wills on Circumstantial Evidence, c. 5, 91; Best on Presumptions, part 2, c. 1, 63, 64; c. 3, 31-58; Greenleaf on Evidence, part 5, § § 29, &c.; 11 Criminal Law Magazine, 3; Wharton on Evidence, § 1244; Phillips on Evidence, Cowen & Hill's Notes, vol. 2, p. 289; Lilienthal v. United States, 97 U.S. 237; Hopt v. Utah, 120 U.S. 430; Commonwealth v. Webster, 5 Cush. 295, 320; State v. Bartlett, 43 N.H. 224; Alexander v. People, 96 Illinois, 96; People v. Fairchild, 48 Michigan, 31; People v. Millard, 53 Michigan, 63; Commonwealth v. Whittaker, 131 Mass. 224; Blake v. State, 3 Tex. App. 581; Wharton v. State, 73 Alabama, 366; State v. Tibbetts, 35 Maine, 81; Moorer v. State, 44 Alabama, 15.

The National Law Journal picks its Lawyer of the Year based on an evaluation of an attorney's impact during the previous 12 months. This year's selection: "New Mexico law professor James Ellis, who helped build a national consensus against the execution of mentally retarded criminals and convinced the U.S. Supreme Court of it."

The blog is "Statutory Construction Zone" focusing on recent federal statutory-construction cases. Currently, it covers the Supreme Court, D.C. Circuit, Federal Circuit, Second Circuit, and Fourth Circuit. Each installment includes case summaries, quotations from statutory construction treatises, a law review article recommendation, and a pre-1789 English common law trivia question.

Author-Lawyer Gary O'Connor's goal for the blog is to allow people to keep up with current federal statutory-construction case law (what statutes are being construed, which arguments judges are accepting or using, etc.). Gary says that as far as he knows, there are no similar web sites or regular columns in legal publications focusing on current federal statutory-construction cases.

We hope Gary soon adds the circuits where there is a new Bush appointee sitting --like the Tenth Circuit where Michael McConnell is on board--so we can all track their views on statutory construction.

Thanks, Gary for the valuable addition to the legal blogosphere.

If you are an attorney and concerned about government monitoring of your attorney-client communications, here is a great list of resources on Defending the Attorney-Client Privilege from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). Thanks especially to NACDL director and esteemed Ethics scholar John Wesley Hall of Little Rock, AR.

The 107th Congress adjourned without taking any action on the amendments to the Federal Rules of Appellate, Bankruptcy, Civil, and Criminal Procedure, approved by the Supreme Court on April 29, 2002. Accordingly, the following amendments to the rules will take effect on December 1, 2002, including:

Changes to the Federal Rules will be effective on December 1, 2002. The following rules have been amended:

Appellate Rules: 1(b),4(a)(1)©,4(a)(5)(A)(ii),4(a)(7), 4(b)(5),5©,21(d),24(a),25©,25(d),26©, 36(b),45©,26(a)(2),4(a)(4)(A)(vi),27(a)(3)(A), 27(a)(4), 41(b), 26.1,27(d)(1)(B), 32(a)(2),32©(2), 28(j),31(b),32(d),32(a)(7)©,44

Bankruptcy Rules: 1004, 1004.1, 2004, 2015, 4004, 9014, 9027

Civil Rules: 7.1, 54, 58, 81(a)(2), Admiralty Rule C

Criminal Rules: Comprehensive Style Revisions 1-60 Substantive Amendments to 5, 5.1, 10, 12.2 12.4, 26, 30, 35, 43 Amendments to Implement USA Patriot Act of 2001 - 6 and 41

You can read the full text of them here.

Legal education debt, which tops $84,000 for the average new lawyer, prevents 66 percent of law students from taking public interest jobs, according to a new joint study by Equal Justice Works, the National Association for Law Placement and the Partnership for Public Service. The Washington-based groups promote public interest work.

"The bottom line is America's law school graduates are drowning in debt and shut out of public service at a time when the federal government is facing losses of over half its work force due to retirements, " said Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service."

"More than 94 percent of law students reported borrowing money to attend law school, where median tuition is nearly $23,000 a year."

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